I ordered a set of the micro markers with the white resin base, and a set of mini markers with the blue resin base for 20 markers in total. They were promptly shipped from Litko and arrived in my letterbox in good time. You have to assemble them yourself, which involves wedging the ‘splash’ marker into the base that holds it. This was fairly painless, although I damaged one of the clear micro bases by applying a little too much force during assembly, so just go easy on them.

We’ve played several games now using these as damage markers and I think the general consensus is they’re more visually appealing than dull cardboard tokens. It was a good idea to get a mix of marker types as we’ve started using the larger blue markers to represent two hits (typically awarded by exceeding the Critical Rating of a vessel), while the white markers represent one hit. This means there’s less markers to drag around with each vessel and conserves them for play, although we’ve not run out of markers yet during our 800pts per side games. The markers are also small enough that they can be balanced on top of larger Dystopian War vessels.

If you’re playing Dystopian Wars I’d recommend picking up some of these cheap and cheerful resin splash markers for your table. The price is right and they definitely improve the look of a game in progress.

Here’s the first three escorts painted and varnished with the Army Painter Super Matt Varnish I reviewed last year. They were painted in similar colours to the Diogenes class frigates I’ve already painted, but with more grey and less of the icy blue. The smoke stacks were painted in Brazen Brass, highlighted with Shining Gold and then touched over with Dark Flesh wash. I think these colours provide a nice warm contrast to the cold scheme on the rest of the ship and I’ll be using the same scheme on my Cruisers and Battleships.

The Product:

This post is a brief review of the Army Painter ‘Matt Varnish Spray’ can. This is a 400ml can of varnish with a large, wide spraying nozzle. It’s part of the Army Painter line of products and is designed to be used with figures painted with their ‘Quickshade’ dipping tins. Slavetopainting.co.nz were kind enough to supply a sample can for this review and they sell it for $14.90nzd a can.

How Matt is “Super Matt”?

A good matt spray varnish can be hard to come by if you’re a New Zealand war gamer. For several years most of us have been using the expensive, 150ml spray cans of ‘Moana’ matt artist’s varnish which frankly is most ‘matt’ spray varnish I’ve ever encountered. However Moana was discontinued in New Zealand this year, leaving people frantically buying up the remaining stocks (one local war gamer bought the last fourteen cans in store) and looking for a replacement in the local market. So the arrival of Slavetopainting.co.nz seems quite timely.

I’ve spent the last couple of nights varnishing a variety of dipped figures in the garage with the Army Painter can and have to say it compares very favourably to Moana matt varnish. I can distinguish no difference between the ‘mattness’ of my older figures varnished with Moana and the handful of figures I’ve varnished with Army Painter “Super Matt”. I took a bunch of photos to try and get a side by side comparison of Moana and Army Painter varnished figures but in the end haven’t included them here because the results are identical. I’ll say that again for clarity:

Army Painter Super Matt spray varnish is as good as Moana Matt Varnish in terms of finish.

That should be a big deal to any New Zealand war gamers because it means we still have access to an excellent matt varnish to use on our painted figures. The 400ml can also means you’ll also have a generous amount of varnish to hand, however be aware the nozzle produces a fairly wide spray so you should probably varnish groups of figures rather than individuals to prevent wastage. Army Painter Super Matt covers well and dries quickly with no unpleasant odour and the finished varnish feels as durable as the other spray varnish products I’ve used.

Value for Money?

Army Painter Super Matt spray is available from Slavetopainting.co.nz at $14.90 for a 400ml can. This is superb value compared to the discontinued Moana 150ml can selling for around $12NZ. It is also excellent value compared to the Games Workshop Citadel Matt Spray which is also a 400ml can however sells for almost twice the price.

In Conclusion

I’ll be using Army Painter Super Matt varnish on my war gaming collection from now on and have no problem recommending it to New Zealand war gamers. You should definitely pick up a can if your Moana stash is running low, or you don’t feel like paying twice the price for varnish from your local Games Workshop store.

I haven’t used Army Painter products in the past myself because the cost was prohibitive by the time exchange rates and international shipping were added. I resorted to mixing my own dips instead. However now there’s a local supplier for Army Painter products with reasonable prices I may have to give them a crack. I’m also particularly interested to see how matt the Army Paint matt varnish is, considering Moana varnish is no longer being produced locally.

Slave to painting also carry a nice line of priming and basing products which also look intriguing, and are certainly considerably cheaper than Games Workshop’s equivalent products.

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1. Scrap Dragon sell Pig Iron Products

I ended up with the new ‘Covenant of Antarctica’ forces, ordered from Maelstrom Games and have started painting the contents of that box in a fairly typical ‘winter sea’ splinter scheme. Here’s a slightly murky shot of the first three squadrons of Diogenes class frigates. Just in case I forget, these ships have been primed with 3M Acid Etch, painted with a mix of GW paints and Vallejo Flames of War military colours. Then ink washed with a mix of india ink and Windsor & Newton blue ink and over-painted again with lightened tones thinned with acrylic thinner. They’ve been varnished with the now unavailable Moana Matt Varnish.

The Dystopian Wars ships seem universally excellent. The ships are one-sided resin casts of what appears to be rapid-prototyped 3D models. The level of detail is simply amazing on the ships, so I can only assume Spartan Games are using some expensive laser sintered rapid prototype service. For bombers and other large two-sided flyers the models are cast in pewter and lack the same crispness and level of detail as the resin ships which is a bit of a pity. They’re still passable models, but they’re definitely less defined in terms of surface details like tiny 0.2mm rivets etc.

We’re all painting up our forces at the moment and when you consider a Dystopian Wars naval box force consists of one capital ship, three medium ships, 9 small frigates, two large bombers and 10 tiny flyer tokens it is actually possible we’ll be playing with fully painted forces!

So I asked on our forum if anybody had a decent replacement option and Dustan chipped in with a suggestion. He’s using an automotive primer for his figures these days: 3M’s ‘Etch Primer’ which comes in a 400g can (see the photo). I nipped down to the local Super Cheap Auto and picked up a can for the low price of $19 NZD.

I’ve just finished priming my first batch of figures with it and it works just fine. I’ve finally primed my pewter 15mm Corvus Belli Romans as well as a box of resin Covenant of Antarctica ships for Dystopian Wars. I’ve noticed the spray coverage isn’t as fine as the Skull White can, but I’m only dusting figures and models with the primer, rather than trying to get solid coverage. A dusting of 3M’s etch primer doesn’t obscure any detail that I noticed and adheres well to plastic and pewter. It does adhere to resin, but not quite as strongly (you can scrape it off with a fingernail), but that’s fine as I’ll be over-painting it with several coats of acrylic paints. The primer has no negative effect on plastic or resin that I can detect and Vallejo and GW paints go over the primer coat just fine as well.

So if you’re sick of paying a ‘GW’ tax on their Skull White primer, try this product instead. It is just over a third cheaper, and you get more than an extra third of paint in the can as well. Thanks for the tip Dustan!

My order arrived last week and I was pleasantly surprised how much fun mold #320 is to cast and build with. It’s a pretty hungry mold plaster-wise, but a single cast gets you enough bits and pieces of pipe to make an interesting 6″ linear barrier for pretty much any 28mm scale war game you can think of. The pipe sections obviously work very well for sci-fi or modern terrain, but with the right brassy paint job a few pieces could probably be added to the side of a fantasy building for some kind of brewery or mad alchemist’s laboratory.

After casting the mold a couple of times I couldn’t resist playing with the parts and dug out a pre-cut and bevelled 3mm MDF base I had kicking around. I cut and bevelled a whole bunch of random organic shapes years ago and have been working my way through the stack ever since. It’s a great time saver for just cracking into a random terrain piece when you feel like it.

This bit of Necromunda/40k/Pulp terrain is made from just two casts of mold #320, a piece of cut chicken wire, some corrugated cardboard and based with a mix of kitty little and model railway ballast. The chicken wire and cardboard was used to build that little shack over a vertical tap piece which is obscured in the photos, but you can see in the unpainted terrain.

The pipes were painted with grey latex house paint and then weathered with the Vegemite technique before airbrushing them red with hobby paints and then over-painting them with my home-made dipping varnish. The base is just dry brushed with a couple of layers of dirty brown latex house paint as well. Things were left pretty generic as I plan to use this terrain for Pulp gaming, and possibly Necromunda or 40k terrain if I ever get around to playing those systems again. I’ve included a couple of Games Workshop Imperial Guard Cadians just for scale indication.

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1. Hirst Arts Cathedral Update VI

Create Details

Early 20th century buildings typically include a lot of surface detail they’re built from brick with added stucco or concrete rendered details over the top. Building details are fairly repeatative so I usually create a few simple masters for pillars and panels, and then cast them in resin to add to the basic flat wall described in the previous post.

The masters for these building details are small and constructed from various thicknesses of plastic card, super glue and green stuff. You should be able to create these detail pieces in an evening of sculpting. The photo shows the only masters I created for this second facade, apart from my generic 15mm windows. There’s a basic pillar which is made from plastic card strips, green stuff and some resin details I cut off an earlier pillar I made for my first 15mm facade. There’s also a left and right decorative bracket which adds to the roofline. Again this is constructed from the swirl piece cut from an earlier pillar, a scrap of plastic card and some green stuff.

Mold and Cast Details

Once these details are mastered I mold them, using the technique I’ve discussed in another tutorial and cast them in resin enough times to cover the facade. Be aware that casting in resin with some molding rubbers tends to destroy the mold as it leaches silicone from the rubber, eventually making it brittle and your mold prone to tearing and losing detail. That’s ok though because for this facade I only needed around 10 casts of the pillar.

You can see the RTV rubber mold in the photo as well. For resin molding I typically dust the entire mold with an un-scented baby talcum powder which acts as a mold release for the set resin pieces. The talcum powder will also help the resin flow into small details and corners. I use a 1:1 clear mix resin product from TopMark here in New Zealand. For European and US visitors I’m sure you can find an equivalent resin product from a local supplier. I mix the resin and pour it into the mold, and use a toothpick to lift and air bubbles trapped in corners before the resin starts to cure and turn opaque. The mold is then covered with an old CD jewel case cover, which has also been liberally dusted with baby talcum powder. This is because you want the detail casts to have a flat back, but you don’t want them to stick to the CD cover.

Cast enough resin details, clean them up with some light triming and filing and you can start applying them to the basic wall. It’s often worth casting a few extra parts and storing them for later re-molding (if your original mold has perished from the resin casting), or for use in creating new master pieces.

Applying Details

Here’s the finished master for the 15mm facade. You can see I’ve applied a set of the cast resin pillars and added the roof bracket details as well. Two resin pillars were cut down to make the smaller pillars flanking the top window. The rest of the building detailing has been added using a variety of thicknesses of plastic card cut into strips. This is where the faded pen guide lines the basic wall picked during casting come in handy to keep everything fairly straight. It’s worth taking the time to make sure everything is straight because you want to cast a set of these. For example several of the pillars were glued down and then pried up and reseated to get them straight.

Unfortunately I can see several parts of this facade that are crooked, can you spot them? The bottom left pillar is crooked, the middle row far left window isn’t straight and some of the plastic card trim has a noticeable bend in it. However chances are you won’t notice these issues once the buildings are on the gaming table and you’re standing 2-3 feet away from them.

Also take some time to make sure everything is well sealed. You can see above I’ve used a grey epoxy resin to seal the tops and bottoms of the resin pillars against the plastic card strips. I’ve also brushed on a water based DIY gap filler product to seal the gaps around the resin window frames and seat them into the basic wall more smoothly. This step is important because you want to get a clean mold of the whole facade, and having gaps between parts will allow the RTV to sneak behind details, leaving you with some fiddly mold trimming to do.

In the final post, I’ll cover molding, casting and creating terrain with the complete 15mm facade.

Related posts:

1. Sculpting a 15mm Building I – Tutorial
2. Tutorial: Cheap Flexible 15mm Roads
3. FOW: 15mm Zeltbahn Tent Variants

I’ve created a couple of 15mm building facades for European style 19th century buildings for war games like Flames of War. The first of which you see to the left. I’ve just completed the second after a three year gap so thought I’d document the process here for future reference.

Inspiration

The first step is to find a building that you want to render in 15mm scale. There’s plenty of World War II photos on the internet and a Google image search will find you a bunch. Unfortunately these are typically either aerial reconnaissance photos taken from great height, or street level photos taken after terrible bombing has occurred. At any rate they typically lack enough detail to work from. I just wandered around my local city (Auckland, NZ) looking for buildings that were built in the early 1900′s that I thought wouldn’t look out of place in a European city, or on a WWII war gaming table. My second 15mm facade was inspired by the building to the right. The roof line in particular looked European to me.

The Basic Wall

I’ve created both the facades by starting with a plain 5mm thick wall of cast Ultracal 30 (a hard plaster) with voids for the doors and windows. Once I have a basic wall I’m happy with I add details with resin cast parts and green stuff patching.

So here’s the basic wall mold for my second facade. This has been created from a piece of white plastic which you can see has been measured up for 15mm scale high floors and gridded to indicate placement of the doors and windows. The important thing to remember here is that this mold is reversed. That’s because you want the smooth, face down side to become the outer facing surface on your final basic wall. The walls of the mold are build from cut plastic card and are held in place and sealed with masking tape. You can see a piece of foam board has been cut to act as a former for the curved roof detail. Cut foam board pieces have been glued to the backing plastic where the doors and window voids need to be.

Ultracal 30 is then mixed and poured carefully into this simple mold, making sure we go no thicker than the 5mm foam card door and window inserts. Once the whole mess has set you should be able to pop the backing plastic off the basic wall, push out the foam card voids and tidy it all up with some careful filing.

Here’s the de-molded basic wall, which has had the foam card spacers removed. You can see a bit of the foam card left around the large bottom window. Notice this is the face down side of the mold, and you can see where the Ultracal 30 has lifted the penned in grid lines from the mold above. That’s actually kind of handy as they can also act as guides while you’re apply details.

I’ve forced in some custom resin windows I’ve sculpted as well, unfortunately breaking the basic wall in half in the process. That’s why you can see a crack running across the bottom of each window pillar. Doesn’t look like much at the moment does it? That’s because it needs some details!

The next post I’ll cover sculpting, casting and applying resin details to the master.

Related posts:

1. Sculpting a 15mm Building II – Tutorial
2. Tutorial: Cheap Flexible 15mm Roads
3. Tutorial: Weathering Vehicles with Marmite

The portholes were mastered from a 1mm ceramic tap washer with a set of green stuff rivets applied using the end of a mechanical pencil. I have to thank Dustan for telling me how easy this technique is for 28mm scale rivets. I found it so useful I’ve converted the mechanical pencil tip into a permanent riveting tool by epoxying it to a bamboo shaft. Now I have a useful porthole I’m wondering what else I can use it for? Maybe for detailing the bollards if I ever get around to building a suitable dockside for the Tramp Steamer.

I need to apply a little more detail to the ship before I start painting it. I’d like a deck winch of some kind at the bow, a set of anchors and I’ll also need to bend some wire to make a set of radio antenna on the roof of the bridge. That’ll probably do I think as the ship is primarily intended as a gaming surface, not a scale model of a real ship of any kind.

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1. Tramp Steamer Ship Doors – Pulp

However playing an interesting Pulp scenario across various hand drawn maps representing the interior decks, and finishing on the ship itself was great fun and inspired me to do some sculpting to finish the blighter off. First up I needed ship’s doors and portholes to cover the blank holes I’d cut in the 2mm cardboard used for the superstructure. A little research netted various pictures of ship’s doors. I went for a simple double dogged door and frame. It’s all just cut from 1mm plasticard with dremmeled curves and detailed with trimmed plastic rail and greenstuff. The frame and door aren’t very symmetric, but once molded and cast that shouldn’t be too obviously hopefully. Heck it’s a rusty old tramp steamer after all.

I plan to cast these in Ultrasil Blue and them mold them in resin. I briefly considered trying to make the door have a working hinge, but then figured tiny 2mm resin hinges wouldn’t stand up to any serious gaming. I’ll leave the doors detached, but probably glue some plasti-card rails to the backs so they can be pushed into the fixed frame.

Unfortunately I discovered while I still have plenty of Ultrasil rubber left, the blue hardening compound has dried to dust, which after some experimenting seems to just be the blue colouring as the rubber will no longer set. Damn. Guess I shouldn’t have left it on the shelf for years. So I’m picking up a new kit from TopMark tomorrow and will have to finish off a few projects to try and use the kit up rather than sticking it in the garage for years to expire!

Update: Picked up another small Ultrasil Blue kit from TopMark today and had a word with their ever helpful staff. Apparently it’s not uncommon for people to want to purchase more of the blue ‘Part B’ hardener out of these kits so they sell it separately in 50ml (for $16NZ) and 25ml bottles. 50ml of hardener is what you get in the smallest Ultrasil set that I purchased, so I certainly didn’t need that much. Unfortunately they were out of 25ml bottles at the time. Ah well, I’ll stretch the new kit as far as I can on hardener and see how it goes. Molding up a couple of sculpts as we speak to finish off a few things.

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1. Tramp Steamer Portholes – Pulp

Our kids have gone through most of the series, excavating classics like Tyrannosaurs, Stegosaurs, Triceratops, Brachiosaurs and Pteradons. They’re from 4M Industries and are available locally (in New Zealand) from a bunch of places, including IQ Toys, The Warehouse and even our local Pak’n'Save supermarket for roughly $20nz a kit.

I was vacuuming up the latest lot of red dust from the living room when it occurred to me that these kits are almost the right scale for 28mm Pulp figures. A quick wiki for a comparative chart of Tyrannosaur specimens and they seem fairly close. So I nabbed the Tyrannosaur off my son’s bookshelf and took the photos you see here. Those are a couple of Copplestone Casting figures standing under the plastic Tyrannosaur.

Looking at the figures together it seems dinosaur is a touch over scale, maybe about 5-8% too large. It probably doesn’t help that the dinosaur is high rearing pose, a bit of cutting and reposing would probably fix that, but as I said this is from my son’s bookshelf so that’s not an option for this particular figure. The very white plastic is also a little off putting, but you know what would fix that? A nice overcoat of some home-made varnish based dip. The plastic these kits are made from is that cheap, fairly flexible stuff so I wouldn’t recommend trying to paint one with any kind of water based acrylic paint, but a polyurethane varnish would probably adhere fairly well.

So, if you’re looking for a cheap, roughly 28mm Dinosaur skeleton, I’d recommend these toy kits from 4M industries. Even if you don’t use the whole figure, they’re still a useful model for Pulp gaming. I intend to experiment with push molding the head and maybe several of the bones to try and create my own set of ‘paleontology excavation’ terrain pieces.

Or rather, mostly finished. I haven’t painted and dipped all of the options that came out of the box, and would still like to have the giant millstone + collar option to play with. Various other giant bits and pieces got added to my Mordheim box for later use. The gibbet and cage for example as it seemed a shame to use them all these great parts on one figure. However I’ve certainly painted enough bits and pieces to have a variety of different looking giant figures on the table for Warhammer Fantasy, or Mordheim.

You may notice some changes since I started painting the figure. In particular I snapped off the plastic arrow I embedded in the left arm so many times I thought to heck with it and just left it off. I also never got around to trying to paint any tattoos or wode on the giant, as Dustan pointed out how difficult it is to get convincing looking tattoos while painting at 28mm scale. So in the end just opted for a dirty, leathery looking skin tone for his torso.

I do still think he needs a little something more detail on the top half. The figure’s torso is very bare and quite odd looking to me. That’s why I want to paint up the millstone + collar, to cover some of that vast square belly. All in all he was pretty quick to paint with brushed on dip and has come out reasonably well. The dip is a little dark though when the figure is on the table, and I probably should have thinned it a little before covering such a large figure with it.

Hopefully I’ll remember this post when it comes to mixing another batch of custom dip…

Related posts:

1. Dipped Giant WIP – Warhammer
2. Dipped Giant Body WIP – Warhammer
3. Dipped Orc Border Patrol Complete – Warhammer

Here he is half painted and brush dipped up to his waist. It’s such a large figure there was no way I was going to dip the whole thing at once, mainly because of the short work time of the moisture cured varnish I based my dip on. So I’ve painted the figure’s base and main body and brushed on dip in two phases. The first was the base and his feet, the second was up to his waist. I was a little nervous about overlapping the dip like this, but of course since it’s varnish there’s no problem with applying multiple coats, or getting a bit of overlap at certain points.

You can see the finish on the varnish is quite shiny. That’s why you need a good matt varnish to use when dipping figures. Once the shine is gone, the dip seems to lighten a bit and the details will be more obvious. Although I am wondering if multiple coats of a less toned dip might be a better option in the future. Mind you a Fantasy Giant probably spends most of his time outdoors, so a particularly dark and leathery skin tone was what I was aiming for with this paint job.

Now to just finish off the shield arms and dip them and he’ll be done! Adding 245 points to my Warhammer Orcs and Goblins army, and possibly making an appearance in Mordheim.

Related posts:

1. Dipped Giant WIP – Warhammer
2. Dipped Warhammer Giant Complete – Warhammer
3. Dipped Orc Chariots – Warhammer

Skip forward to 2011 and it turns out a lot of the Warmachine figures are now resin, and after discovering Daniel and Chris have been playing it for a while I decided to dive in and give Warmachine a try. Chris also took a couple of us through a few demo games of Warmachine vs Hordes and it seems like a nice fast evening game at the low point values.

Daniel recommended ordering over the web from Maelstrom Games in the UK because of their low prices and free shipping. So for a total of $77NZD I ordered the resin Cryx Battlegroup and a metal Pistol Wraith. Being new to Warmachine I have no idea if this is a viable force (one would hope the starting box doesn’t completely suck) but it does reach the minimum 15 points level.

Maelstrom were easy to deal with, sent me email notifications of the order progress and the goods arrived nicely packaged and undamaged a week later. So I’ll happily recommend them to any other New Zealand gamers looking for a discount web store.

Assembling the figures was straightforward, although the resin material Privateer use is a little different than I’m used to. It doesn’t file well, and under a Dremel tool tends to melt fairly easily so it must have a pretty low melting point. On the plus side it’s also easy to reshape in a cup of boiling water. This turned out to be important as I had to re-shape Deneghra’s spear which was noticeably curved.

Having assembled this Cryx group to a playable state, I look forward to losing repeatedly to Chris and Daniel for the next year of gaming nights…